Broadband access creeps along but DDoS attacks explode

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Akamai released its quarterly State of the Internet reports today, one detailing quality of access and the other attacks on companies and infrastructure. The slow march continues towards a better and faster internet for everyone — and that includes hackers.

Broadband adoption is measured at various levels — 4, 10, 15, and 25 mbps — and it’s a mixed bag: the slower speeds saw growth, while the faster ones declined slightly on a global level. Many countries saw double or even triple digit growth year-over-year, though, so work is being done. Good job by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland especially.

In the U.S., the highest average connection speed was to be found in DC: 24.3 mbps, just shy of the 25 mbps suggested by the FCC as the definition of real broadband. Those speeds are increasing with a quickness, however, with the connection speed in many states going up by 20-50 percent YoY. We’ll get there yet!

Note that these measurements are very different from those done by Speedtest.net and others; Akamai doesn’t include connections to streaming servers, for instance, lowering the average. There’s more detail on how they measure this stuff at this blog post.

IPv4 address are still being passed out like candy, even though at current rates they’ll be gone in a few years. Some are making the effort, though: with 38 percent of all connections over IPv6 last quarter, Belgium beats= the next country down (Greece) by 13 percent.

And credit where credit’s due: U.S. carriers, both mobile and terrestrial, are pushing as well: Comcast and AT&T are approaching 50 percent of connections over IPv6, T-Mobile is at 61 percent, and Verizon (which owns Aol, which owns TechCrunch) is at an impressive 74 percent.

It was a banner year for hackers too. The largest DDoS attacks ever observed took place, and they keep getting bigger. Akamai notes a 363 gbps attack this quarter, but others have rated higher: Krebs on Security was hit with one above 600 gbps, and even more recently one aimed at a French web host was measured at over a terabit per second.

Well, what did you think was going to happen with all that extra bandwidth we’ve been adding?

Featured Image: xPACIFICA/Getty Images

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